When nearly all the 7.4 billion citizens of this planet can establish their own blockchain-based user-centric or self-sovereign identity and a persistent, portable reputation, each of them will be able to transact or bootstrap themselves into enfranchisement in the emerging global digital economy¹.

When your blockchain-based reputation enables you to get a microloan (through EtherLoan, for example, which is one of our spoke companies) from someone on the other side of the planet and use that blockchain-based money to buy a tool upon which to start a small business, the world gets integrated and national identity becomes less relevant.

When groups set up online voting systems designed to mirror and hold legacy political voting systems to account, Main Street and Pennsylvania Avenue will become more transparent to each other. Anyone will be able to contrast what benefits the average citizen to the policies pursued by lobbyists and politicians, and that gap could be closed by popular demand.

Self-sovereign identity and a persistent, portable reputation, in addition to other anti-spoof elements that we are working on at ConsenSys, have the potential to solve the Sybil Attack problem in which it is cheap and easy to set up fake identities on the internet. Once this is achieved, a major impediment to provably fair decentralized voting systems will have been cleared.

Platforms where anyone can “bet” on the outcome of any decidable event, also called prediction markets or wisdom markets, are a powerful use case for the blockchain. For instance, Gnosis is a wisdom market built on Ethereum, where people seeking the truth in certain situations might post a “consulting fee” to surface information that might affect business or political activity.

When other wisdom seekers do the same, putting more value behind that quest for truth, people who were never before incentivized to surface such information might become “wisdom consultants”. These wisdom consultants might blow the whistle and collect that consulting fee. The worlds of accepted fact and actual truth might come closer together, and the infrastructure that supports deep, systemic corruption might fade.

The prospect of low-corruption future elections is enough to excite 99% of the world’s citizenry.

¹ We are building such a user-centered identity and reputation platform at ConsenSys. uPort is a mobile app that allows individuals to register their unique identity into the blockchain, which becomes a persistent trust anchor for all of their digital interactions. Individuals use this identity as a universal log-in for digital services and as a personal signature for digital transactions. Since all digital actions are now tied to this identifier, it earns a reputation over time. All of this information is stored in an encrypted, user-controlled environment, so it is free from reliance on legacy institutions and enables identity to represent a much richer representation of an individual.